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This blog looks abandoned but helps explain why some people, definitely including myself, would rather wear a toilet seat round their necks than a dratted poppy.
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Crikey J, that brought a sudden shock of memory: meeting Marlene when she was in her sixties and I was a young man, on the stage of the Aldwych theatre, in 1964. She was a friend of Peter Brook, and he brought her onstage to meet the cast when she came to see his production of âThe Persecution of Jean-Paul MaratâŚetc.â Big hit in London that year.
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Karen. 11th November is a major holiday/remembrance day in France. Itâs not shifted to the weekend, like they do in the UK. Whatever day 11th November falls on itâs a holiday/day of remembrance in France.
Small towns and villages all have their memorials to the dead. Even small hamlets have them. I was living for a while in such a small hamlet; just a scattering of houses, yet their war memorial shows the names of 12 young men who died in the horror of the trenches.
If interested, long ago now I made a radio programme about it allâŚ
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The Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele), 31st July â 10th November 1917, resulted in about 1 million casualties. The death rate was about 5000 every day, for months on end.
For what�
Donât people ever learnâŚ
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This is what I was, alas quite crudely, trying to convey. Remembrance would be a bit more convincing as a ritual if âleadersâ would emphasise this. But see where it got Jezza Corbyn, ridiculed for seeming reluctance to launch they ICBMs AND commemorating the wrong victims.
Not bowing deeply enough.
Assymetrical poppy.
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My prog about French trench poetry was kind of done on the side, whilst I had other major programmes in production.
One of them was an hour long programme about CuenodâŚ
http://www.localradio.fr/shows/cuenod/index.shtml
Hopefully my production values were a bit better on this one. Janet and I had great fun making this programme, and I hope this comes across.
Donât worry if youâre not into opera. The stuff I feature in the programme comes into a recent post I made about punk music.
As usual, you couldnât make this stuff up.
Ok, youâll be bored with opera.
ABBA have made a recent comeback.
Just about everything ABBA ever did came from the programme I link to above.
You donât have to be a muso to know this stuff.
Iâlll get onto punk rock later.
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Look forward to it. Unfortunately the links donât seem to work on the device im using, but will bookmark and come back via Windoze another time. ABBA are a guilty pleasure, or at least their uptempo stuff. The slightly morbid tracks like Fernando, not so much.
Weâve noticed the difference between French and UK war memorials. Have you ever seen a weeping woman with small children carved in stone in this sad country? No shortage of long lists of names on English villages memorials mind.
I always remember St. Mark on his day. What a strange coincidence that remembrance of the first successful act of resistance to war in the Western world has been obliterated by the celebration of killing & dying in the modern era. Lets pretend that he was one of the first out of the blocks in the virtue-signalling stakes instead eh? (beggar, cloak, cut in half)
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